explain

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for explain is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪkˈspleɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,365 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for explain, with forms such as "epxlain", "exlpain", and "expalin". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 3 confusable-pair relationships, "exploit", "explained", "exclaim", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English explanen, from Old French explaner, from Latin explanō (“to flatten, spread out, make plain or clear, explain”), from ex- (“out”) + planō (“to flatten, make level”), from planus (“level, plain”); see plain and plane. Compare esplanade, s… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is explain, spelled E-X-P-L-A-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.